Committees

Names, IDs, contact info, and memberships of committees and subcommittees in the House and Senate.

All committee information is sourced from bulk data at github.com/unitedstates, which in turn comes from official House and Senate sources.

Feel free to open a ticket with any bugs or suggestions.

We only provide information on current committees and memberships. For historic data on committee names, IDs, and contact info, refer to the bulk data.

Methods

All requests require a valid API key, and use the domain:

https://congress.api.sunlightfoundation.com

/committees

Filter through committees in the House and Senate. Filter by any fields below that have a star next to them. All standard operators apply.

Committees and subcommittees a given legislator is assigned to

/committees?member_ids=L000551

All members of a particular committee

/committees?committee_id=SSAP&fields=members

Joint committees, excluding subcommittees

/committees?chamber=joint&subcommittee=false

Subcommittees of the House Ways and Means Committee

/committees?parent_committee_id=HSWM

Disabling pagination

You can turn off pagination for requests to /committees.

/committees?per_page=all

Fields

* = can be used as a filter

{
  "name": "House Committee on Homeland Security",
  "committee_id":"HSHM",
  "chamber":"house",
  "url": "http://homeland.house.gov/",
  "office": "H2-176 FHOB",
  "phone": "(202) 226-8417",
  "subcommittee": false,
}

name
Official name of the committee. Parent committees tend to have a prefix, e.g. “House Committee on”, and subcommittees do not, e.g. “Health”.

* committee_id
Official ID of the committee, as it appears in various official sources (Senate, House, and Library of Congress).

* chamber
The chamber this committee is part of. “house”, “senate”, or “joint”.

url
The committee’s official website.

office
The committe’s building and room number.

phone
The committee’s phone number.

* subcommittee
Whether or not the committee is a subcommittee.

Members

{
  "member_ids":[
    "K000210",
    "S000583"
    ...
  ],

  "members": [
    {
      "side": "majority",
      "rank": 1,
      "title": "Chair",
      "legislator": {
        "bioguide_id": "K000210",
        "chamber": "house"
        ...
      }
    }
    ...
  ]
}

Note: membership information is not returned by default for requests to /committees. You must specifically request these fields by using the fields parameter as documented in Partial Responses.

* member_ids
An array of bioguide IDs of legislators that are assigned to this committee.

members.side
Whether a member is in the majority or minority of this committee.

members.rank
The rank this member holds on the committee. Typically, this is calculated by seniority, but there can be exceptions.

members.title
A title, if any, the member holds on the committee. “Chair” (in the House) and “Chairman” (in the Senate) signifies the chair of the committee. “Ranking Member” (in both chambers) signifies the highest ranking minority member.

Subcommittees

{
  "subcommittees": [
    {
      "name": "Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies",
      "committee_id": "HSHM08",
      "phone": "(202) 226-8417",
      "chamber": "house"
    }
    ...
  ]
}

If the committee is a parent committee, the subcommittees field contains a few basic fields about its subcommittees.

Parent Committee

{
  "parent_committee_id": "HSSM",
  "parent_committee": {
    "committee_id": "HSSM",
    "name": "House Committee on Small Business",
    "chamber": "house",
    "website": null,
    "office": "2361 RHOB",
    "phone":  "(202) 225-5821"
  }
}

* parent_committee_id
If the committee is a subcommittee, the ID of its parent committee.

parent_committee
If the committee is a subcommittee, some basic details